Part Three—Pre-Interview (continuing where part two left off):
So you’ve now gotten a real email address. Assuming that you’re not going through a firm or a headhunter then you still have to do some work. Just because you may be the perfect person for a job, and your resume is in the system, that doesn’t mean it will ever be read.

See, you have to remember that the HR people are not your friends yet, even though they tend to be very friendly people. Their job is also not to find the best person on the planet for a particular position. Their job is to find 3-5 good fits that could fill a position and put those people in front of the decision makers.

Because, think about this. A decision maker has to make decisions about a lot of things. They’re busy people. So they don’t want to interview 40 people when they could find a good fit after just a few.

So your goal is to be on the top of the pile. Aside from nepotism there are a couple of ways to accomplish this.

If you know someone in the company, get them to do an internal submission for you. Those are normally put higher on the queue, and you can get your friend to go to the HR person directly to find out if they’ve gotten the resume, and where they are in the hiring process. It also helps because your friend can be assumed to be someone that knows the culture fit, so you’re already partially pre-screened.

If you don’t know anyone then you might need to be a bit duplicitous. This is a bit sneaky and underhanded, but I’ve seen it work at law firms, schools for educational positions, when applying for office manager positions, and in my own computer industry. You send your resume in before noon. Then around 1 o’clock either call (if you can get a number) or email and say something like “I sent you a resume this morning, and I just found out that some of the attachments I was sending out were getting corrupted. Could you do me a huge favor and just open the attachment real quickly? I just want to make sure it got to you ok.”

There are a lot of reasons that this works.
1) HR people tend to want to help others in general, so they normally don’t mind doing something small to help you out
2) Once they’ve got your resume open, they will often look at it. Especially if they aren’t currently in process doing anything else.
3) It’s the same day, so it’s a plausible amount of time for you to be having an “oh s#!t” moment where you want to fix a problem before it becomes a problem.
4) This doesn’t hold true for everyone, but many HR people will do meetings in the morning and paperwork in the afternoon. So the time of day they’d be reviewing resumes is in the afternoon, and now yours is already open. So there’s at least a decent chance that they will go ahead and review it.
5) It also shows you have real interest in the company and aren’t just collecting another name and company for your unemployment benefits.

At this point it’s out of your hands until they call you back to schedule a phone screen or an interview. When that happens you should grab your list of companies and have just a sentence or two to remind you of what the company does so you can sound like this is really high on your list. You should also, if you get a shot, ask about the general business environment. The real goal here is to figure out how to dress on the interview. You should try and dress as well as the best dressed person you’ll meet with, or 1 step above. (That’s a general rule of consulting.)

I know the rules well for guys - ladies, you’ll have to fill in your own equivalents here. But if the environment is described as client-facing or fairly conservative or formal you should expect to be wearing a nice suit to the interview. If it’s “dynamic and fast paced” then slacks and a sport coat or a nice shirt and slacks without a tie might be more appropriate. You should never go as casual as jeans or a polo shirt for an interview, but the coat and tie is a variance. The color of the shirt can also be a factor - bright colors exude confidence and energy, but they also can convey a sense of independence that very conservative companies may not like. When going into tech companies I normally will wear a suit, but with a bright colored shirt and matching tie. I’ve had some success going without a tie as well, but that was for “casual” environments.

The goal here is to show that you fit into their culture, and clothing is a good indicator of personality in a lot of peoples’ minds. (I tend to disagree with that assessment, but I’m not beyond playing on peoples’ preconceptions either.)

The final thing is how to schedule the interview. If you’re working with a headhunter you can just tell them your real schedule, but if you are dealing with the company directly then you should give them 2 or 3 options if they ask for your schedule. “I’m free all day Tuesday, and before lunch on Thursday and Friday” makes it sound like you have other interviews, but are giving them enough options to find something to work with. You want to be open enough to give them some good time, but not so open that it looks like you aren’t finding other opportunities. In short, you want to look valuable and make them want to compete for you, but you also want to be attainable and flexible. If they say that none of the times you told them work,ask them what time they have and then say you can call back in a few minutes to confirm that time after you’re given a moment to move things around. That is, of course, unless you really do have a conflicting interview. You shouldn’t ever move anything around if you can help it. The truth is that businesses are a lot less flexible than you are when it comes to schedule, so once something is on the calendar, you should leave it there.

That should get you all the way up to the interview.

Previously:

Part One: Finding Jobs

Part Two: Cover Letters and Resumes

Coming Soon:

Part Four: The Interview
Part Five: Salary Negotiations.

Patrick Gary is a Dallas based technical consultant and multifaceted musician who refuses to let any single realm of life or group of interests completely define or encapsulate him.
You can read more about him at Troupatour.com